V
"It looks…"
"Just like the way it's always looked."
Reno glanced at his partner as they paused before the entrance of the Golden Saucer. The ropeway looked a little more rusty, the streams of people wandering through the doors a little thinner, but otherwise, this was the good ol' Golden Saucer they'd always known.
"Looks like the Chief was wrong on this one," Reno said, tapping his foot.
Rude shrugged. "Since when was trouble obvious at first glance?"
Reno snickered and struck a pose. "Since us, of course. What're we supposed to do exactly, anyway?"
"Contact Dio. There was a shipment of materia and weapons that went missing while passing through here on its way to Junon."
"And if Dio got his grubby hands on it, don't you think he's the worst person to ask?"
Rude shrugged.
"I suggest we do a bit of good old fashioned snooping around before we go contact that fellow. Who knows, we may find the shipment sitting in his basement, eh?"
'Snooping around', Reno decided, after five hours of crawling through the Golden Saucer Corel Prison and interrogating everyone in sight, wasn't the brightest idea he'd ever had. Clearly, if the shipment had ever passed through the Golden Saucer, it hadn't passed through places where the average person could see it.
Duh, he thought. Big trucks come into this place all the time and leave all the time. No one's going to notice anything out of the ordinary.
He leaned back as Rude made 'inquiries' of the Golden Saucer staff. The man on the right was going to piss his pants, Reno noted. Rude seemed to have that sort of effect on people, and he didn't even need to say a lot. Funny, because Reno always seemed to have to say plenty before anyone would tell him what he wanted.
Nothing, Rude indicated, with a shake of his head as he came walking back. Reno ground out his cigarette, sighing quietly under his breath. "Time for plan B, then."
"We have a plan B?"
"Nope."
Generally, plan B involved busting out the big guns and blowing everything to smithereens. Generally. Nevermind that Rufus had spent a lot of time reinforcing the concept of discretion being the better part of valour to them.
The Chief didn't get it, sometimes. You had to blow up the nest to get the vipers out.
Back in HQ, Elena would be busy running the decrypters on the Saucer's radio frequencies and would update them when she was done. Those damned frequencies had thus far proven remarkably resilient to cracking. Either that or things had really gone downhill since Weapon. Possibly both. Either way, it did seem as if there was nothing they could do at the moment.
"What do you think?" Reno asked, as they wandered back to their hotel.
Rude shrugged. "I think it's a miss."
Reno glanced at him. "You sure."
"Fairly."
A cigarette appeared between Reno's fingers as if by magic, as he stuck it into the corner of his mouth and gnawed gently on the filter. Rude's instincts were rarely wrong. It was as if the man, by speaking less, actually did see more, although Reno had tried that himself and it hadn't worked for nuts. Not at Chocobo racing, anyway. But generally, if Rude said that there was nothing, even Tseng took it to mean that trouble was really deeply buried, or they'd called a total miss on this one.
And yet, Rufus…
"Doesn't work by gut feeling," Rude said, with his uncanny way of picking up on his thoughts.
"Yeah," Reno agreed, lighting up. Rufus worked by data. By patterns. By uncanny intuition that bordered on genius, some said, but the Turks knew that it was born of long years of observation and analysis. Well, it still bordered on genius, but hey, the Chief would never rely on something as base as gut feeling.
"Tell me again what leads he gave us."
"Nothing," Rude said. "Just that the relevant shipment disappeared."
Monsters out on the plains were a possibility. The courier appropriating the shipment was a possibility. So were brigands and other people desperate to get their hands on a weapons consignment. Back in the Department's heyday, no one would have gotten away with that. Ever. But these days, all they had were their facilities at Junon, and even Rufus had to work with one computer instead of four. Awww, the sad.
"We should interrogate Dio."
"We were told not to."
"Chief's gotta stop playing these political games and still expect us to do our job," Reno scowled.
Gravel crunched underfoot as they made their way back up to the hotel. He had a feeling he knew how this job was going to turn out, and those feelings of his were rarely wrong. They'd wait for Elena to report back that she'd been unable to crack the codes, or that she'd cracked the codes and there was nothing of interest. They'd bitch to Rufus about being allowed to bust into Dio's posh suites and stick a pistol under his fat chin. They'd be overruled. They'd be ordered home and sent off chasing some other lead. Or there'd be another assassination somewhere. Or any combination of the above.
'Bad day at work' took on a whole new meaning in the Turks, sometimes.
"You have one new message. Play it now?"
"Cloud, it's Elena. How are you? Hope the accident didn't leave any lasting effects… At any rate, if you're looking for work, we have a few things we need to run from Junon to Kalm and the Edge. You can reach me at this number. Thanks, and take care!"
"Delete message without saving?"
"Message deleted."
He could delete the messages… could delete as many of them as he wanted, but it was harder to escape from the other signs of Shinra Company making, by all accounts, a fairly good comeback. Just in the distance, he could see one of those public TV screens broadcasting another interview with the man, seated behind a desk and looking immaculate in white and black as he talked about Shinra's new global policy.
"Shinra Company owes a massive debt to the world. I accept responsibility for our past actions …"
The camera cut to scenes of Shinra firing up its first wind powered facility, panning across the phalanxes of white turbines scattered across the edge of the cliffs over Junon.
"Mr President," the interviewer was saying, "Nevertheless, it is said that alternate sources of energy will never be an effective substitute for mako energy. How do you expect to address that?"
"At the moment, we are falling back on coal and oil. Minimal modification is necessary to convert the Corel and Nibelheim Reactors to run on those sources respectively. However, the Midgar reactors are of different design, and their stability is suspect. As such…"
People watched this things with varying levels of disbelief and suspicion, Cloud noticed. No one seemed willing to accept Shinra's promises. Yet Rufus was slowly winning people over. Shinra's deeds – never played up on television – were starting to speak for themselves, and the President had been sighted limping around in Corel to attend to the reactor's re-opening. Without a Turk in sight and just Reeve by his side.
Sneaky, aren't you? Cloud thought. And yet he couldn't stop himself from glancing back at that screen, just as Rufus looked up from his papers.
"I'd like to thank everyone for their support. In these trying times, no contribution is too small, and we cannot stand alone…"
"Thank you, Mr President. Ladies and gentlemen, Rufus Shinra, on behalf of the new Shinra Electric Company."
Rufus smiled. And suddenly Cloud felt his breath hitch, and he was caught, drowning in blue eyes, even though he knew that Rufus wasn't looking at him, just the camera, just—
--a click, then the screen went to black.
A chill raced over his skin; one that had nothing to do with the weather.
There was always a certain amount of temptation to fling the PHS across the room after dealing with Reno.
Always.
Chief, if you'd just stop being a pansy and let us crack down on real Turks style, you know, the rubber hoses and truncheons and—
"Sir," Tseng said, as Rufus snapped the phone shut with far more force than was strictly necessary.
"Damnit, Tseng." He slammed the PHS down on the table, scowling at the readouts on his laptop screen. His temper flared, in a way it hadn't done in … years, probably. "For once in my life, I wish that everything would stop going wrong!"
The curse streaked across his senses, triggering red flags from years of etiquette training, and he ignored it. "I need these assholes to stop killing my employees so I can help them fix their stupid miserable lives. I need these shipments to stop disappearing. I need forces, I need firepower, and I need it without making Shinra look like it's rearming!"
Somewhere in the midst of the tirade, he had shoved his chair back, and was pacing furiously in front of the window, involuntarily wincing at the stiff twinges that were the effect of staying seated too long.
"And most of all, I need this goddamn pain to stop!"
Tseng stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, and pulled him closer, wrapping warm arms around him. With anyone else, Rufus would have snarled, too furious to be coddled and knowing too well that it solved nothing whatsoever. But for them… they'd spent too long apart, too many years over a PHS instead of face to face, too many near death experiences marring their memories, that everything was far too precious to waste.
He leaned his head against Tseng's shoulder, breathing deeply.
"We'll earn their support soon, sir," the Turk said.
It will all be easier if Strife would just…
But here, now, the thought gave him a guilty twinge. The look in Strife's eyes as he walked out – this is all you want me for, isn't it? – it triggered something long buried and suppressed in him. The ache of a child realizing that no one loved him, and that he was nothing more than a pawn of the Company.
"That's all you want me for, isn't it? To wave in front of the cameras?"
Tseng must have felt the sudden tension in his shoulders, because his hands had started tracing circles on his back.
What am I supposed to do? He thought, allowing the despair that had become a permanent specter lurking on the edges of conscious thought to sink its claws in. Everything going to hell, and I don't have half… or even a quarter of the resources that I used to. Everytime I think I have it, someone comes along and blows up another Shinra center just for the hell of it. I can't use the word 'terrorist' in relation to them without triggering Sector 7 vibes. I've milked the 'please let saner heads prevail' line to death. Alternate energy sources weren't used for a reason – they're horrible inefficient. People look to me for some kind of miracle, and don't want to pay or trust me for it…
"What did I do to warrant all of this?" he mumbled.
Tseng was silent, as he usually was. No wallowing in self-pity, the silence said. You, of all people, cannot afford to do so.
He raised his head, contemplating the lines of Tseng's tie and how they would just slip away if he tugged this strand at that angle… and then the button underneath, allowing the collar of the white shirt to fall away, exposing a triangle of pale skin—
--the shrill of the PHS dragged him back to duty. Rufus allowed himself one harassed sigh before detangling himself from Tseng's embrace and walking over to the desk. "Call Elena, will you?" he said, as he picked the phone up, cradling it unopened in one hand. "Tell her to stop attempting to contact Strife."
Tseng raised an eyebrow at that.
"I'm sure," Rufus told him, and flipped the phone open. "Rufus Shinra."
05-12-14: Press Release 134 People Die in a Mining Accident in Corel
An explosion in the number 7 mine shaft of the Corel mines killed 134 workers and injured 56 more. The blast, which occurred at around noon, was believed to have been caused by build up dangerous mine gases. Sensors indicate that all surviving workers have been successfully evacuated. The shaft has been closed.
Mr Barret Wallace, spokesman for Corel Town, was quoted as calling this a terrible tragedy. Mining work has been halted in all 10 shafts as safety measures are carried out.
With the closure of the mako reactor, Corel has returned to coal as its primary source of energy. This incident has prompted fire from critics of the move, who cite the pollution and the danger of mining accidents as chief reasons for retaining use of mako energy, at least until an equally clean and efficient source of energy can be found.
Methane is the principle component of mining gases, and tends to rise and stratify if not properly diffused, as it is lighter than air. Not only is it extremely combustible, when combined with coal dust, it can trigger a massive explosion. 5 such explosions have occurred in the history of the mining town, the worst of which was 24 years ago. Almost 200 people died in that blast when the entire shaft collapsed.
Shinra Electric Company, which is overseeing the conversion of the mako reactor to run on coal power, could not be reached for comment.
-
05-12-17: Press Release Mako switchever in Edge
As supplies of refined mako run low, Midgar and the Edge are preparing for the switchover from mako energy to alternative forms of power. Oil and natural gas will account for 56 of the present energy consumption in the cities, while it is hoped that solar power will make up for the rest. However, there is expected to be a large shortfall until the hydroelectric power plant in Junon can be completed. The plant is slated for completion last next year, and it will require another three months to run the cables across the Junon mountain range to Edge. All in all, it seems set to be a cold winter in the Edge.
Mr Reeve Tuesti, leader of the World Restoration Organization, regrets the inconvenience and encourages everyone to save power by using natural light when possible, and wood fires for central heating. According to a press statement issued at 1000 hours today, the WRO will be working together with Shinra Electric Company to issue home-use solar cells and batteries to as many households as possible.
-
"Rufus, did you hear the news?"
"What news?"
"Sudden cold spell causes multitude of deaths in the Edge... About 15 people were found frozen to death as temperatures plunged last night to an all new low of -10F… The city has been facing an energy crisis since it switched over from mako energy… something about this being the coldest winter in thirty years…"
"What do you expect me to do, Reeve? You know as well as I do that we've done all we can!"
"I… didn't you have emergency stockpiles of mako for—"
"—for an emergency. Not for this."
"This isn't an emergency!"
"You and I have been over this before. An emergency is another world threatening catastrophe. Or, at the very least, a massive natural disaster."
"……"
"I'm sorry."
"Well, yes, yes you're right. I just wish there was something more we could do…"
"We all do, Reeve. We all do."